As promised, I thought I would write a few words on the question: is Scott Roeder a murderer? (This is working on the assumption that Roeder did, in fact, shoot George Tiller in the Reformed Lutheran Church in Wichita. If he did not, the discussion can be applied to the person who did in fact shoot Tiller.)

I’d like to start with a few preliminary observations.

1) There is no question that, legally speaking, Roeder’s crime qualifies as murder. As a private individual, and with no authority whatsoever, he intentionally killed a person who had been convicted of no crime, and who was posing no immediate threat to Roeder or any other person. The action shows every sign of having been premeditated. From a legal perspective, then, this looks like a clear-cut case of murder. My question concerns the moral status of Roeder’s action.
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Consider this an exercise in getting an assignment in under the wire.  For the rest of this week, it is still the Year of St. Paul.  (St. Paul is a worthy man to have a year for, but do you get the feeling that from now until the Second Coming the folks in the Vatican will declare every year to be the Year of X?)  So, in honor of the Apostle to the Gentiles, I have decided to transcribe the major events of his life.  In the Patriarchal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (also known as the Ostian Basilica), there are 36 paintings that depict the life of St. Paul.  They begin with scene #1 (Saul’s participation in the martyrdom of St. Stephen) to the immediate right of the apse and line the nave down the right side, cross the middle, and line the left side of the nave until scene #36, the martyrdom of St. Paul, which is to the immediate left of the apse.  In other words, the apse of the church is flanked by the martyrdom of St. Stephen, to which St. Paul consented, to the right and the martyrdom of St. Paul to the left.  The entire story of St. Paul’s conversion is defined by these two acts of witness.  There is a side-chapel to St. Stephen (below the relevant painting?); I have read that St. Augustine attributed St. Paul’s conversion to the prayers of St. Stephen. 

But I digress.  Below I have recorded the Latin captions that accompany each painting.  Except for the last few scenes, I have included the passage from the Acts of the Apostles that narrates the event in question (#18 is particularly choice).  I’ll try to provide some English translations later on, but enjoy cutting your teeth on the Latin for the time being!

1.  Saulus erat consentiens neci.  Acta Apostolorum 8:1-3

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Once again the pace of posting has become a little sluggish here of late. Personally, I have spent the last few weeks 1) finishing piles of grading from last semester, 2) writing a paper and then giving it at a conference, 3) attending a seminar on religion in the post-Soviet world, and 4) taking care of house guests. Now that these tasks are all through, I am settling into my summer routine, and I should be able to manage a post at least once a week for the coming months, and hopefully more often. What’s happened to my slugabed companions I can’t say… but check back! I’ll try to keep controversy brewing here. Among the things I hope to post in the next week or two are some reflections on whether or not Scott Roeder is really a murderer, and a self-indulgent recapping of my naming debate in which I clear up the misconceptions of some of my deluded commenters. :)

But for today, I thought I might start by throwing out this quote from a recent article in America magazine:

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Well, it seems the Cornell Society for a Good Time is getting a bit lazy as the summer months come upon us… not sure what’s happened to my companions. I for one have been working to finish up the semester and prepare a paper for an upcoming conference. But I thought I’d take a break to sound off on another issue of some importance to me… name-piling.

Name-piling is what I call it when a couple gives a whole list of names to their infant. A first name and a family name are obviously necessary, and I think middle names are acceptable, though frankly I have some reservations even about those (more on that later.) But I think a parent needs a darn good justification to put more than three names on their child’s birth certificate. And in fact, I favor a general trend towards greater economy in naming.

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I just ran across this story, fearfully predicting that Catholics could become “the next Mormons,” fighting on the gay marriage front in the state of Washington. Washington has not legalized gay marriage yet, but only today the governor signed a bill granting same-sex couples the same legal rights and benefits as married couples. Washington is one of ten states with a legislatively passed Defense of Marriage Act. (Twenty others have constitutional provisions of some sort specifying that marriage is defined as being between one man and one woman.) But the worry is that the court will soon overturn the DOMA, and that gay marriage will soon follow. The Knights of Columbus have already gotten a jump on the action, so this liberal writers unhappily speculates that Catholics might step into the role played by the Mormons last fall in the battle over California’s Proposition 8.

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What with all the confirmations that are scheduled this time of year, I was musing today on a question that’s several times perplexed me. Why is it that so many Catholics, despite being completely non-practicing, still care so much about getting their kids baptized and confirmed?

The confirmations are the most puzzling of all. I sort of understand why people want to cling to the remnants of tradition at important moments in life. However hostile they are to tradition and traditional religion on an ordinary day, most people still yearn for some of the traditional trimmings when they’re married and buried, and perhaps when a child has just been born. (Of course, without improperly formed sensibilities, they’re liable to want to mix a few traditional elements with a whole variety of sentimental, inappropriate extras. Still, you can see at least a glimmer of the right sort of desire.) That really doesn’t explain, though, why non-practicing Catholics would want to be confirmed. Confirmation is only a rite of passage within a specifically religious context — unlike weddings or funerals, there’s no secular equivalent. And even if parents yearn for their kids to have a “coming of age”, secular society provides substitutes — high school graduation, for example.

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In honor of the 2000th post here at the Cornell Society for a Good Time, I thought it would be fun to offer a free giveaway. Therefore, if you act now, the Cornell Society for a Good Time will buy you lunch from KFC! Click here to download your free coupon for two pieces of the new Kentucky Grilled Chicken, together with a biscuit and two sides. Yeah, we know how people are hurting in these financially tight times, and as thriving academics we’re prepared to share of our incredible largesse. We weren’t kidding about the Good Time part.

Oh, all right. It’s not really us that’s running this promotion. It’s KFC that’s financing it, and Oprah Winfrey who’s the primary publicist. But the link really works, and as long as you download your coupon before midnight tomorrow (May 6) you really can get your free chicken. If you heard it here first, I expect you to dedicate that first crunchy bite to the Cornell Society for a Good Time and our 2000 wonderful posts.

… and sometimes it isn’t. And it’s funny how, so often, it’s the not complicated parts that people can’t seem to get right.

I’ve often thought this with respect to the laws of the Church, but especially confession. I mean, seriously. Going to confession isn’t that hard. I mean, yes, sometimes there’s a particularly embarrassing thing that you don’t want to confess, and you spend awhile debating just how much specificity is really required. But basically, at the end of the day, it’s pretty tough to shock a priest. He’s heard it all before. I think, most of the time, priests (the good ones, anyway) are less interested in how little or how much you have to confess, and more just pleased that you’re coming to confession. After all, the whole reason they’re in the confessional is to help people with their sins, so presumably they want people to come. And from your angle, it basically just takes those few minutes, after which you’ve got a load off your mind, and can worry that much less about getting hit by a bus on your way home from work and ending up in hell because you were too squeamish to go to confession!

So that’s one case of people ridiculously refusing to do something that’s relatively easy, and obviously good for them. I was realizing today, though, that this is in no way an unusual or unique phenomenon. People are foolish about all kinds of things in life.

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First, I confess that this post will not be professional theology.  Rather, it is a hit job on some of the platitudes that circulate among would-be amateur theologians, the type of platitudes that kill souls with their sophistry.  When I was a child, I imagined heaven and hell as places.  Heaven is up high, somewhere in or beyond outer space.  Hell is a fiery place near the earth’s core.  Basically, like most people, I placed heaven and hell where Dante does in his “Divine Comedy.”  Only later did I learn (the falsehood) that the physical heavens and the physical underworld are thoroughly secular affairs.  How many times have we read some self-appointed question-answerer in a church bulletin or a diocesan newspaper say, “Well, you see, Virginia, heaven is not a physical place, nor is hell. They are the spiritual states of immaterial souls.  The beatific vision or lack thereof of a separated, disembodied soul cannot be physically located.  Ergo, heaven and hell are not physical places.”  Sed contra:  where is the Risen Body of Our Lord?  Where has the body of Our Lady been since the Assumption? Continue reading

There is a divergence of opinion among members of this Society on whether rising early each day is a morally superior act. The majority opinion holds that a schedule for sleeping, working, and living should be considered provisional and personal, chosen or found by personal experimentation as that which maximizes productivity and happiness. In other words, under the covering name of “night owl”, many I know — and respect! — claim that to work into the night, arise late when not called to an early appointment, and thus to divorce their lives from the diurnal cycle, is a morally neutral choice founded on the necessities of personal rhythm and physiological constitution. And while I do not propose to denounce this position with anything like forcefulness, the purpose of this brief reflection is to argue that it is in fact superior to subject one’s schedule to stricture and sacrifice through a generally regular, preferably early, sleep and waking time, even while making allowance for personal variation in wakefulness.

If I am to begin, I must delay in advancing the explanations for why an early and regular waking time is desirable, which anyway are felt by even those most devoted to lying late abed, immediately to answer the dominant objection: what if I am not tired at 9 or 10pm, but am in fact most awake and productive at that hour? Continue reading